Carl and Felicie Bernstein

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Carl and Felicie Bernstein were the first collectors of French Impressionist painting in Germany. The Bernsteins' collection was first shown in their literary salon and later in the first German Impressionist exhibition and made a significant contribution to the reception of this art movement in Germany. The Bernsteins salon, which Felicie Bernstein continued after her husband's death, was one of the most important meeting places for artistic life in Berlin from the 1880s to 1908.

Life

Max Liebermann:
Portrait of Prof. Dr. Carl Bernstein
1892
Felicie Bernstein
photography around 1872

Originally from Russia, Carl Bernstein (* 1842 in Odessa ; † September 30, 1894 in Berlin ) had received his doctorate in Berlin in 1864. Since he did not get a job as a Jew in his home country, he first went to Berlin as a private lecturer. In 1878 he became an associate professor for Roman law at the Friedrich Wilhelms University . His publications include the teaching of alternative will and alternative legal transactions (1878) and teaching of the dotis dictio (1885).

His wife Felicie Leonovna, née Rosenthal (born September 7, 1852 in Saint Petersburg , † June 11, 1908 in Berlin), lost her mother at an early age. Her wealthy father, the Kommerzienrat Leo Rosenthal, sent her to a boarding school in Dresden. After their wedding in Vienna in 1872, they both moved to Paris, where they lived for several years. In 1878 they settled in Berlin and moved into a shared apartment at Lennéstrasse 2 in Berlin's posh Tiergarten district . They later moved into the so-called “presidential apartment” on In den Zelten 23 street . This representative apartment was built as a speculative object. The apartment intended to be rented to the President of the Reichstag was not rented by him and thus served the Bernsteins as a posh address.

Together with Carl Bernstein's sister Therese Bernstein, the couple designed the Wednesday evenings as a literary salon , in which numerous intellectuals from the imperial era frequented. Felicie Bernstein acted as a cheerful and spirited salonnière , while Therese Bernstein strictly watched over etiquette in the tradition of the précieuses . Musicians such as Joseph Joachim and Richard Strauss , painters such as Max Klinger , Adolph von Menzel and Max Liebermann , the archaeologist Adolf Furtwängler , the writer Georg Brandes , the theater director Otto Brahm , the historians Ernst Curtius and Theodor Mommsen and the art historians attended the weekly jour fixe Georg Treu , Wilhelm von Bode , Friedrich Lippmann , Hugo von Tschudi and Woldemar von Seidlitz .

In the summer of 1882, the Bernsteins traveled to Paris, where they met Carl Bernstein's cousin Charles Ephrussi , the editor of the art magazine Gazette des Beaux-Arts . Together with his assistant Jules Laforgue , he advised the Bernsteins on the purchase of Impressionist paintings. This first collection of Impressionist pictures in Germany initially met with great rejection in Berlin from both artists and art critics. Adolph von Menzel's statement to Felicie Bernstein has been passed down: “Did you really give money for the dirt?” Only Max Klinger commented positively in a letter from Paris that he was “the perfect, almost contemptuous rejection, which one in Berlin owned by Dr. B ... n the collection of pictures of the Impressionists with most of the spectators and primarily with the artists themselves excited, still alive in the memory ”, and he pleaded:“ Despite the likely condemnation, it would be worthwhile to have a good collection of the Exhibiting Impressionists in Berlin. ”On October 8, 1883, the gallery owner Fritz Gurlitt opened the first Impressionist exhibition in Germany in Berlin, which included ten works from the Bernstein Collection and 23 loans from the Parisian art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel . The pictures in the exhibition were criticized in the press for being sketchy and lacking technical skills . In addition, the critics found the subjects inappropriate and lacked any intellectual content . Even the later director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Alfred Lichtwark , wrote in a newspaper report that the “witty sketches full of light and movement” could not be “a sufficient basis for a new art”. It was not until the 1890s that Max Liebermann began collecting French Impressionists, and Hugo von Tschudi acquired a work by Édouard Manet for the National Gallery in Berlin in 1896 .

Carl Bernstein was portrayed in 1892 by Max Liebermann, who described the Bernsteins' salon as the "resurrected salon of Frau Henriette Herz ". Due to Carl Bernstein's illness, however, the Bernsteins gave up this salon in 1891. The couple stayed in Berlin only occasionally and then lived in the Hotel Kaiserhof , where Carl Bernstein died in 1894. After the death of her husband, Felicie Bernstein and her sister-in-law Therese Bernstein († 1902) moved to Stülerstrasse 6 and ran a regular salon there again from 1896. This also included Sunday receptions, which were accompanied by a musical framework program. In addition to Max Liebermann, the artists Sabine and Reinhold Lepsius , Curt Herrmann , Walter Leistikow and Louis Tuaillon were among the guests. Felicie Bernstein ran her salon until 1908, the year she died. Felicie Bernstein's grave is in the Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Weißensee .

The Bernstein Collection

Music room by Carl and Felicie Bernstein with pictures by Édouard Manet, Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro

Carl and Felicie Bernstein's apartment in tents 23 was furnished with furniture from the 18th and 19th centuries. There were also valuable handicrafts such as oriental carpets , tapestries and Japanese vases. The Bernsteins' favorite artists were initially Dutch landscape and genre painters such as Jan van Goyen and Adriaen Brouwer . During their visit to Paris in 1882, they acquired around ten Impressionist paintings, some directly from the collection of their relative Charles Ephrussi. From Édouard Manet they acquired the pictures The Steamer's Departure to Folkestone , The Bouquet of Lilacs , Peonies and a Crystal Vase with Roses, Tulips and Lilacs , the Poppy Field from Claude Monet and one or two other landscapes, from Edgar Dega's wife in a café , from Alfred Sisley The Seine at Argenteuil and by Camille Pissarro Paysannes travaillant dans les champs, Pontoise . The other pictures in the collection are unclear. Hugo von Tschudi reported about a woman portrait by Eva Gonzalès and Marie Cazin as well as a child's head by Giuseppe de Nittis and Georg Treu remembered a painting by Mary Cassatt . Felicie Bernstein continued her collecting activities even after her husband's death and, for example, acquired Manet's Still Life Peaches in 1907 . In addition, Felicie Bernstein collected various handicrafts, such as porcelain figures and artistically designed fans.

Felicie Bernstein exchanged pictures from this collection with Max Liebermann for some of his works. She also acquired pictures by Max Klinger and other works by young German artists. After her death, most of the paintings were bequeathed to friends. Liebermann received Monet's poppy field , which he had always admired in the Bernsteins' house. In 1908, the lilac bouquet by Édouard Manet was donated by Felicie Bernstein to the collection of the National Gallery in Berlin. She donated a river landscape by Jan van Goyen to the Berlin Gemäldegalerie . This picture was later exchanged by the museum for a forest landscape by Lucas van Uden . To support young artists, she also founded the Therese Bernstein Foundation , named after her sister-in-law, to the amount of 10,000 gold marks , which made scholarships possible for the Villa Romana in Florence. Felicie Bernstein received the Cross of Merit with a white ribbon for her charity .

  • Édouard Manet:
    Fliederstrauß
    Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

  • Edgar Degas:
    Woman in a Café
    Private Collection

  • Alfred Sisley:
    The Seine at Argenteuil
    private collection

  • Claude Monet:
    Poppy Field
    private collection

literature

  • Anna-Carolin Augustin: Berlin art matronage: collectors and sponsors of fine art around 1900 , Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2018, ISBN 978-3-8353-3180-8 .
  • Anna-Dorothea Ludewig: "Did you really give money for this filth?" - The Carl and Felicie Bernstein Collection in Anna-Dorothea Ludewig (Ed.), Julius H. Schoeps (Ed.), Indes Sonder (Ed.): Aufbruch Into the modern age: collectors, patrons and art dealers in Berlin 1880–1933 , DuMont, Cologne 2012, ISBN 978-3-8321-9428-4 .
  • Barbara Paul: Three collections of French Impressionist art in imperial Berlin - Bernstein, Liebermann, Arnhold . In: Journal of the German Association for Art History Volume 42, 1988, pp. 11–15.
  • Andrea Pophanken, Felix Billeter (ed.): Modernism and its collectors. French art in German private ownership from the Empire to the Weimar Republic . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2001.
  • Stefan Pucks: From Manet to Matisse. The collectors of French modernism in Berlin . In: Johann Georg Prinz von Hohenzollern, Peter-Klaus Schuster (ed.): Manet to van Gogh; Hugo von Tschudi and the struggle for modernity . Munich, New York 1996, ISBN 3-7913-1748-2 , pp. 386-390.
  • Petra Wilhelmy-Dollinger: The Berlin Salon in the 19th Century (1780-1914) . De Gruyter, Berlin and New York 2000, ISBN 3-11-016414-0 , pp. 311-314. 612-614.
  • Angela Windholz: Florence dances around in my head too: the Villa Romana in Max Klinger's letters to the publisher Georg Hirzel . Munich 2005, ISBN 3-422-06592-X , p. 284.
  • Georg Treu: Carl and Felicie Bernstein: memories of their friends . Book printing of the Wilhelm and Bertha von Baensch Foundation, Dresden 1914 (with texts by Georg Treu, Wilhelm Bode, Hugo von Tschudi, Georg Brandes and Max Liebermann).

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Anna-Dorothea Ludewig: “Did you really give money for this filth?” - The Carl and Felicie Bernstein Collection , p. 90.
  2. ^ A b c Petra Wilhelmy-Dollinger: The Berlin Salons , pp. 309-311.
  3. ↑ see Anna-Carolin Augustin: Berliner Kunstmatronage: Collectors and Supporters of Fine Art around 1900 , p. 373.
  4. ↑ Anna-Dorothea Ludewig: “Did you really give money for this filth?” - The Carl and Felicie Bernstein Collection , p. 94.
  5. ↑ Anna-Dorothea Ludewig: “Did you really give money for this filth?” - The Carl and Felicie Bernstein Collection , p. 94.
  6. ^ Stefan Pucks: From Manet to Matisse , p. 386.
  7. ^ Max Klinger: Kunststreifereien in Paris reproduced in Barbara Paul: Three Collections of French Impressionist Art ... p. 12.
  8. ↑ Vossische Zeitung No. 473 of October 10, 1883 and a. in Barbara Paul: Three Collections of French Impressionist Art ... p. 14.
  9. ^ Alfred Lichtwark: Gurlitt's autumn exhibition in Die Gegenwart Vol. 24 of October 27, 1883 reproduced in Barbara Paul: Three Collections of French Impressionist Art ... p. 14.
  10. ↑ Max Liebermann: My memories of the Bernstein family . In: Carl and Felicie Bernstein: memories of their friends . Dresden 1914 ( digitized ).
  11. ↑ Degas exhibition catalog , Paris 1988, p. 288.
  12. ^ François Daulte: Alfred Sisley, Catalog raisonné de l'oeuvre peint Lausanne 1959, No. 29 quoted in Barbara Paul: Three collections of French impressionist art ... p. 14.
  13. ^ Lionello Venturi : Camille Pissarro, Son art - son oeuvre Paris 1939, No. 1345, quoted in Barbara Paul: Three collections of French impressionist art ... p. 14.
  14. ↑ Anna-Carolin Augustin: Berlin Art Matronage: Collectors and Supporters of Fine Art around 1900 , p. 226.
  15. ^ Anna-Carolin Augustin: Berlin Art Matronage: Collectors and Supporters of Fine Art around 1900 , p. 227.
  16. ↑ Anna-Dorothea Ludewig: “Did you really give money for this filth?” - The Carl and Felicie Bernstein Collection , p. 90.
  17. ^ Anna-Carolin Augustin: Berlin Art Matronage: Collectors and Supporters of Fine Art around 1900 , p. 374.
  18. ^ Letter from the board of directors of the Villa Romana to Max Klinger from February 1908 in Angela Windholz: Florence dances around in my head too: the Villa Romana in Max Klinger's letters to the publisher Georg Hirzel . P. 284.
  19. ^ Anna-Carolin Augustin: Berlin Art Matronage: Collectors and Supporters of Fine Art around 1900 , p. 374.